Nature, like close-knit human community, is designed to help us stay sane.

LAST EVENING, ON the longest day of the year, I took a walk in a meadow
near my home.

At the edge of the meadow a path opened into the woods, and I followed
it perhaps a hundred yards to the bank of a small stream where I rested
on a rock and watched the brook flow. Then I walked back.

Nothing spectacular happened. No large animal jumped out to demonstrate
its majesty. The flora was beautiful but unremarkable: buttercups, Queen
Anne's lace, daisies, lupins. The sky didn't crackle with summer lightning;
the sunset was only streaks of purple, some rosy glow on the underbellies
of the clouds. A few mosquitoes made their presence known. It was simply
a lovely night.

And simply the sort of scene that we have evolved with for hundreds of
thousands of years, that has made us who we are, that we can't be fully
human, or at least fully sane, without. The sort of scene whose absence
in our lives is now making us slowly crazy. If there is a pertinent modern
question, it is "How much is enough?" The consumer societies
we have created posit that the only possible answer is "More."
And so in pursuit of more we have turned ourselves into tubby folk, raised
the temperature of the planet one degree with a further five degrees in
prospect, countenanced the ever deeper gulfs between rich and poor, and
so on. And in the process made ourselves happy?

But say you're in a meadow, surrounded by wild flowers. Do you find yourself
thinking, "They could do with some more wild flowers over there"?
Do you glance up at the mountains on the horizon and think, "Some
more mountains would be nice"? Do you lie on the rock by the brook
thinking, "This brook needs more rocks"? Does the robin in that
tree chide herself for not tripling the size of her nest? I think not.
Nature schools us in sufficiency - its aesthetic and its economy demonstrate
'enoughness' at every turn. Time moves circularly through the natural
world - next spring there will be wild flowers again. Not more wild flowers:
second quarter output for 2005 will show no year-on-year gain. Growth
only replaces, since the planet is already accomplishing all the photosynthesis
that's possible. It offers the great lesson of being simultaneously abundant
and finite.

Interdependent, too. The emergent science of ecology is easily summed
up: everything's connected. Field biologists using sensitive detectors
have discovered that the needles of trees near Alaskan rivers owe their
nitrogen to the carcasses of salmon that die along the banks, the same
salmon that feed the bears whose pawing aerates the soil that

We know now that this is true, but interconnection is anathema to a consumer
notion of the world, where each of us is useful precisely to the degree
that we consider ourselves the centre of everything. We believe that pleasure
comes from being big, outsized, immortal; now our zealots imagine genetically
engineering us for greater greatness. But the testimony of the rest of
creation is that there's something to be said for fitting in.

And because of that, the natural world offers us a way to think about
dying, the chief craziness for the only species that can anticipate its
own demise. If one is a small part of something large, if that something
goes on forever, and if it is full of beauty and meaning, then dying seems
less shocking. Which undermines about half the reason for being a dutiful
consumer, for holding ageing forever at bay. Six months from now, on the
shortest night of the year, this field will be under two feet of snow.
Most of what I can see will be dead or dormant. And six months after that
it will be here again as it is tonight.

Advertising, hyperconsumerism, ultra-individualism - these are designed
to make you crazy. Nature, like close-knit human community, is designed
to help you stay sane. You needn't be in the wilderness to feel in balm:
a park, a container garden on the patio, a pet dog, a night sky, a rain
storm will do. For free. o

Bill McKibben is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College in
Vermont and author of Wandering Home.